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Summary: Chapter 14

Thomas writes another letter to his now dead son. He’s planning to meet with Oskar in an hour to dig up his son’s grave. 

After the first note to Grandma, Thomas writes a second asking if she wants to see him. She holds a sign in her window that says, “Don’t go away.” She responds to his next note with a sign saying that she doesn’t want to see him. Thomas throws an apple at her window. Because the window is open, it goes into her apartment, and the doorman sends him up to retrieve the apple. Grandma tells him he’s only allowed in the guest room.

When Thomas returns to America not long after his son’s death, he writes “to try to live” on his paperwork at passport control. He goes through customs not declaring anything. When a guard comments that he has too much luggage to not have anything to declare, Thomas opens his suitcase to reveal the letters to his son. 

Thomas first heard about 9/11 while writing a letter to his son from the Dresden train station. One day, in the list of casualties, he sees the name “Thomas Schell,” as if he himself had died. Thomas learns that he has a grandson. 

Thomas finds a payphone and calls Grandma. When she answers, he presses the numbers corresponding to the word “hello,” but she doesn’t understand. He presses numbers over and over again. The next time Thomas calls Grandma from the payphone, Oskar answers the phone. Thomas hangs up. He takes a taxi to Grandma’s building, where he learns she’s reverted to using her maiden name. 

Thomas moves into the guest room. Eventually, Grandma begins to visit him. She tells him that she can forgive him for leaving but not for returning. Thomas asks her to pose for a sculpture, and she agrees. He goes to an art store and writes his name on all the tester sheets. 

When Thomas begins to pose her, Grandma explains that she hasn’t had sex with anyone since he left. Thomas admits to seeing sex workers. Grandma loves that he’s telling her the truth. 

Grandma refuses to let Thomas meet Oskar and says that Oskar isn’t his grandson. Thomas asks if he can watch Oskar through the closet keyhole, and she agrees. The next day she sits in the closet with Thomas all morning. She tells him that the discomfort he feels is how she’s felt. When Oskar arrives, Thomas looks through the keyhole and sees Oskar has Anna’s eyes. He wants to speak to Oskar and perhaps give him the letters his son never read. 

Thomas writes a letter to Grandma about his life Dresden after he left her, but she doesn’t want to read it. Thomas asks about their son, and Grandma says that, despite her efforts, he became very much like Thomas. Thomas admits that their son actually found him in Dresden but pretended to be a reporter researching survivors of the bombing. 

Thomas follows Oskar around on his quest for the lock. When Thomas goes to Georgia Black’s apartment, she exclaims that their family is very strange. She had just spoken with Oskar’s mother. Thomas doesn’t understand, and she tells him about the key. Thomas realizes that just like Thomas Jr., Oskar has gone on a quest to discover more about his father. After this, Thomas goes into a bookstore and sees a man who he thinks is Simon Goldberg. Thomas writes that he doesn’t speak. The man gives him a hug before walking away. Thomas isn’t sure it was Simon.

The next day, Mr. Black confronts Thomas in front of the Empire State Building. Mr. Black lets Oskar walk down the stairs so he has time to warn Thomas to stop stalking Oskar. Thomas explains who he is. As the men hear Oskar approach, Mr. Black says that Thomas should have been the one going around with Oskar. 

Back at Grandma’s apartment, Thomas panics. Suddenly, he hears Oskar enter. As Oskar tells his story, Thomas wants to tell Oskar he would never leave him. 

Thomas writes on and on about how much he wishes he could have had time with Thomas Jr. Slowly, his words start doubling up on each other until the words blur into black. Black squares of blurred text follow.

Analysis: Chapter 14

The fact that Thomas never sent the letters to his son raises questions about the actual purpose those letters fulfilled. Because of the doorknob images, we know that Thomas writes these letters in his notebooks, and the doorknobs symbolize the locking of his feelings inside. While writing the letters demonstrates a desire to communicate these feelings, instead chosen to lock them in his notebook, unable to free them. In addition, the empty envelopes Thomas sends recall the blank pages of Grandma’s memoir. While Grandma viewed her blank pages as a blank slate to build a life on, Thomas’s silence reflects an inability to fill that blank slate because he cannot communicate in the present. Thomas trying to write to his son again serves as an extension of his statement that he’s “trying to live.” By writing his dead son a letter he’s begun to express feelings that he’s locked inside. In this way, the letters represent a step forward from the blank envelopes he’s been sending Grandma. However, though Thomas does write the letters, he cannot send them. Ultimately, Thomas’s letters express a desire to connect with his son and Grandma that he was never truly brave enough to take.

Grandma setting Thomas up in the guestroom has multiple symbolic meanings that demonstrate her tentative feelings toward him. Firstly, by placing him in there, Grandma designates Thomas as a guest in her life, someone temporary. A guest is a liminal figure in the sense that they are someone who both stays and leaves, evoking the tensions Grandma and Thomas have wrestled with between something and nothing in their lives. Also, in the early days of their marriage, Thomas and Grandma designated the guest room as a “nothing” place, where they could stop trying to exist in the present. In addition, Grandma used this room to write her memoir, further tying it to her past. Thus, Grandma has placed Thomas in a room that separates him from her present life both in its symbolic meaning and in the way it represents an old framework of life for her. This set-up allows her to keep Thomas at arm’s length. Her refusal to read Thomas’s letter about his life in Dresden also indicates her desire to keep him in the past, reflecting how Thomas initially returned to Dresden out of an unwillingness to live in the present. Dresden is in Grandma’s past, and she wants it to stay there.

Although Grandma says that Oskar’s dad became a lot like Thomas, based on what the novel reveals about him, this statement doesn’t seem entirely true. While the way Oskar’s dad deceives Thomas about who he is when he visits him in Dresden recalls Thomas’s avoidance of emotionally messy truths, something appears to have changed in Oskar’s dad after that visit. We can extrapolate that Oskar’s dad was the person who made the corrections on Chapter 10 because he used to make similar corrections to the newspaper. This revelation brings new meaning to the fact that Oskar’s dad circles the greeting “To my child” because it implies that he didn’t believe it to be factually correct. This action recalls the way Grandma refuses to allow Thomas to call Oskar his grandson in this chapter because he hasn’t put in any effort to be a part of his life. Furthermore, Oskar’s dad doesn’t focus on meaninglessness or hopelessness in his lessons to Oskar but instead teaches him to actively look for meaning—to “try” like Grandma does.

This chapter explores Thomas’s desire to connect with Oskar and gives an idea what having a relationship with Oskar would really mean. The coat closet scene recalls the symbolism of doorknobs throughout Thomas’s notebooks and the way he has shut himself off from his family by locking his emotions inside. Once again, Thomas is shut away from his family, literally in a closet. However, by allowing Thomas to look through the keyhole, Grandma opens up the possibility that connection can happen. Her inability to contain Thomas in the guest room represents the truth that it’s impossible to completely shut out the past. Just as Oskar has Anna’s eyes, history resurfaces in places that one wouldn’t necessarily expect. Thomas’s realization that Oskar has Anna’s eyes immediately brings him closer to Oskar because of the way Oskar represents that a part of Anna remains alive in both Oskar and Grandma. However, this new hope Thomas feels doesn’t actually equate to Thomas being a grandpa to Oskar. When Mr. Black tells Thomas that Thomas should have been going with Oskar, he speaks to the responsibility of a grandparent to guide future generations through ambiguity. As of now, Mr. Black has acted as more of a grandparent to Oskar than Thomas has. A connection with Oskar is possible, but it has not yet truly begun.


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